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Massive joint US-South Korean military exercises began yesterday under conditions of high tension on the Korean Peninsula following North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in January and rocket launch last month. Under pressure from Washington, the UN Security Council last week imposed the most far-reaching sanctions to date on Pyongyang that will limit its mineral exports and compound the economic crisis wracking the unstable regime. Continue reading →

My first experience with the Wounded Warriors Project came in 2006, when I made several donations from between $200 and $500 to the organization. I was a stock broker at the time and my income allowed for such idiocy. I guess you could say that I had more money than I had sense, but more importantly, I gave the money because I felt that I needed to do something to take part in the war effort, and what better way than to provide financial assistance to those who were coming back from the wars in the Middle East maimed and wounded. At least that is where I thought the money that I was donating was going. Continue reading →

The world’s attention is fixed on Paris. France is tonight a police state. There is concern over ISIS infiltrating Syrian refugees. And of course, the big question, how will the world rid itself of the Islamic State?

But before you listen to one more politician tell you what we need to do, you need to know what politicians knew about ISIS three years ago and the actions they still took.

Rand Paul addresses the funding of ISIS while Authentic Enlightenment’s Chris Perkins asks him about the funding of Israel. Shortly after Rand’s speech, Chris meets him and tries to get him to answer another question. Watch to see and hear the results!

Host of Caravan to Midnight, actor, musician, writer, investigative journalist, composer, martial artist, aviator and broadcaster, John B. Wells finds the ancient sage advice of “concentrating on just one thing” to be true. His one thing: The Arts.

John is also an internationally renowned voice-over artist with credits ranging from serving as the announcer for CBS’ The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, to voicing promos for hit television shows like Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch and Gold Rush to lending his voice to films like Oliver Stone’s JFK and Talk Radio, as well as the popular series Unsealed: Alien Files.

US warplanes began bombing Iraqi targets in June 2014. Last September, US Syrian airstrikes followed. Washington falsely claims it’s waging war on the Islamic State (IS) – with pinpoint accuracy against positions and fighters targeted. It’s just the opposite.

Bombing aims to destabilize Iraq and Syria more than already. Infrastructure sites are struck – not IS fighters as claimed. America is its de facto air force.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) in charge of the air campaign falsely claims few civilian deaths at most – saying pinpoint targeting avoids them, one of the many Big Lies proliferated in all US wars.

Special Forces soldiers from Britain’s most shadowy military unit are dressing as Islamic State militants and traveling deep into the badlands of Syria to track and destroy enemy assets, according to military sources.

It is reported that up to two SAS squadrons of men, around 120 personnel in all, are operating inside the borders of Syria as part of Operation Shader, which aims to destroy equipment and munitions used by the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). Continue reading →

(PressTV)The US Defense Department has awarded major weapons maker Raytheon to provide the Persian Gulf Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with 355 air-to-ground missiles amid its persisting campaign of aerial strikes against civilian and economic targets in neighboring Yemen.

According to a Pentagon announcement cited Saturday by the Russia-based Sputnik News, in a $180-million contract assigned to the arms manufacturer, Raytheon is to deliver the AGM-154 series missiles to the Saudi regime in a move clearly regarded as a bid to support the aerial strikes against Yemen.

I’ve asserted for years that the U.S. Government is an amalgamation of the Third Reich, “Atlas Shrugged,” “Animal Farm,” and “1984.” Once again history is repeating. The Nazis’ contemporaries are the neoconservatives who are running the U.S. Government behind the facade of Obama’s White House.

A Veterans Administration researcher used actors and pressured veterans into participating in a “secret shopper”-style project, and now the House Veteran Affairs Committee is investigating how the agency spent $900,000 for the faked study.

A senior NATO official told former NSA intelligence analyst John Schindler that the world would “probably be at war” sometime this summer.

“We’ll probably be at war this summer, if we’re lucky it won’t be nuclear,” the official told Schindler last week.

Although the tweet was retweeted over 400 times, the comment garnered no mainstream media attention whatsoever, which is odd given that Schindler is a former U.S. Naval War College lecturer and is known to have many high level military contacts.

Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Samuel Hersh claimed yesterday that the Obama administration lied to the American people about certain aspects aspects of the 2011 raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. According to Hersh, the United States did not act alone when Navy SEALs were sent to capture or kill the world’s most wanted terrorist. The real story, according to the report, is that members of Pakistani intelligence services were privy to the raid months before it happened and that it was a “walk-in” Pakistani intelligence officer who gave up the location of Bin Laden rather than a CIA operation that tracked him down by following various couriers. Further, it has been claimed that Bin Laden was not buried at sea the way the Obama administration said, but rather, his limbs were simply thrown from the helicopter after the mission (suggesting that some portion of his body, perhaps his head, were retained for posterity’s sake). Continue reading →

“There will be a war in this country, a civil war to restore, not a revolution, but a civil war to restore our constitutional republican government. Now at the same time that’s going on, communist and marxist underground forces will try to begin a revolution, in order to institute a marxist/socialist/communist government as a result of the civil war.”

US President Barack Obama yesterday raised the stakes in the confrontation with North Korea over unsubstantiated allegations that it hacked into Sony Pictures Entertainment, authorizing a new round of economic sanctions affecting 10 government officials and three state entities. Continue reading →

(BBC) – A report by the US-based group says the deaths occurred in villages inhabited predominantly by members of President Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite sect near the coastal city of Latakia. Continue reading →

Russia and the United States reached a deal on a framework that will see the destruction or removal of Syria’s chemical weapons by mid- 2014. Under the plan, the Assad government has one week to hand over an inventory of its chemical weapons arsenal. Continue reading →

Over the past few days, there has been a tremendous wave of optimism that it may be possible for war with Syria to be averted. Unfortunately, it appears that a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Syria is extremely unlikely.

(Freedom Outpost) – It seems bizarre, but the fact is the Mexican cartels are offering big money to recruit hit men from the U.S. military. They contract highly trained soldiers to carry out murders and even share their expertise with gangs south of the border, according to law enforcement experts.Fox News reports:

The involvement of three American soldiers in separate incidents, including a 2009 murder that led to last week’s life sentence for a former Army private, underscore a problem the U.S. military has fought hard to address. Continue reading →

(Intellihub) -Is the nation too distracted by the George Zimmerman trial’s 24/7 news cycle to even know about this developing situation that coincides with escalating tensions between Russia and US-affiliated nations around the world? Continue reading →

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

War is a Racket by Smedley Butler is a famous speech denouncing the military industrial complex. This anti-war speech by two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient exposes war profits that benefit few at the expense of many. Throughout his distinguished career in the Marines, Smedley Darlington Butler demonstrated that true patriotism does not mean blind allegiance to government policies with which one does not agree. To Hell with war. Continue reading →

MOSCOW—The Kremlin criticized the U.S. decision to arm Syrian opposition fighters and said Washington’s evidence that the Syrian regime is using chemical weapons was unconvincing, but said Friday that Moscow is “not yet” discussing its plans to deliver of air-defense missiles to the regime. Continue reading →

China has been quietly taking steps to encircle the United States by arming western hemisphere states, seeking closer military, economic, and diplomatic ties to U.S. neighbors, and sailing warships into U.S. maritime zones.

The strategy is a Chinese version of what Beijing has charged is a U.S. strategy designed to encircle and “contain” China. It is also directed at countering the Obama administration’s new strategy called the pivot to Asia. The pivot calls for closer economic, diplomatic, and military ties to Asian states that are increasingly concerned about Chinese encroachment throughout that region.

A leading U.S. manufacturing group on Monday called on President Obama to take a tough line on China when he holds his first summit with new Chinese President Xi Jinping at the end of the week in California.

Japanese troops will converge on California’s southern coast in the next two weeks as part of a military exercise with U.S. troops aimed at improving that country’s amphibious attack abilities.

U.S. and Japanese military officials said the unprecedented training, led by U.S. Marines and sailors, will help Japan’s Self-Defense Force operate in stronger coordination with the United States, its main ally, and better respond to crises such as natural disasters.

China may see it differently, however, given the tensions between Tokyo and Beijing over a long-running dispute concerning islands claimed by both in the East China Sea.

“It’s another dot that the Chinese will connect to show this significant expanding military cooperation,” said Tai Ming Cheung, an analyst of Chinese and East Asian security affairs and director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego.

China has, for the first time, attempted to spell out its strategy — and plans — to secure its interests in the Indian Ocean in its first “blue book” on the region, released here on Saturday.

The blue book makes a case for China to deepen its economic engagements with the Indian Ocean Region’s (IOR) littoral states, but stresses that Beijing’s interests will be driven by commercial — rather than military — objectives.

However, it warns that the Indian Ocean could end up “as an ocean of conflict and trouble” if countries like India, the U.S. and China failed to engage with each other more constructively as their interests begin to overlap.

Syrian troops began the first phase of operation “Northern Storm” to liberate the city of Aleppo, attacking militants in the settlements in the west and south of the province.

Their goal is to block militants in the town of Anadan, free the federal road linking the city of Aleppo to Aazaz on the Syrian-Turkish border, controlled by militants for over a year.

Fierce fighting continues for the second day in the vicinity of a military airfield near Aleppo.

“Decisive action by the Syrian army in Aleppo, after the taking of Qusair on the border with Lebanon, as well as the collapse of all hopes for a foreign invasion have utterly demoralized the militants,” said one of the commanders, noting that many members of the opposition are ready to lay down their arms.

President Obama’s perpetual scam machine is in high gear – which signals another expansion of war and war-powers accumulation. The president played the reluctant warrior who doesn’t really want the limitless powers he has arrogated to himself. But, what he’s seeking is formal authorization to escalate the U.S. offensive against world order and civil liberties.

Perpetual War – and Obama’s Perpetual Con Game

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“He admits to having done no wrong.”

Barack Obama is a master trickster, a shape-shifter, and a methodical liar. The man who has arrogated to himself the right to kill at will, anywhere on the globe, accountable only to himself, based on secret information and classified legal rationales, now says he is determined that Washington’s “perpetual war” must one day end – sometime in the misty future after he is long gone from office. He informed his global audience of potential victims that he had signed a secret agreement (with himself?) that would limit drone strikes to targets that pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and cannot be captured – a policy that his White House has always claimed (falsely) to be operative. He promises to be more merciful than before, “haunted” as he is by all the nameless deaths, although he admits to having done no wrong.

He is a man of boundless introspection, inviting us to ride with him on his wildly spinning moral compass. But, most of all, he is not George Bush – of that we can be certain, if only because he is younger and oratorically gifted and Black. “Beyond Afghanistan,” he said, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” Thus, magically, he redefined the U.S. war on terror out of existence (in perpetuity) by breaking the conflict down to its daily, constituent parts, while simultaneously affirming that America will soon travel “beyond Afghanistan” despite the fact that many thousands of Special Operations troops will continue their round the clock raids in the countryside while drones rain death from the skies for the foreseeable future.

Such conflicts, we must understand, are necessitated by the “imminence” of threats posed to U.S. security, as weighed and measured by secret means. His Eminence is the sole judge of imminence. He is also the arbiter of who is to be detained in perpetuity, without trial or (public) charge, for “association” with “terrorists” as defined by himself. He has no apologies for that.

“His Eminence is the sole judge of imminence.”

America must turn the page on the previous era, because “the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11.” A reevaluation is in order, since “we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.” In that case, why not call for repeal of the layers of war on terror legislation that have accumulated over the last 12 years, including Obama’s own NDAA preventive detention bill? Or, he could simply renounce these measures and refuse to employ them as a matter of policy. Instead, the president defended his own maximalist interpretation of the law, and claimed that the legal basis for his kill-at-will authority is firmly rooted in the Congress’s 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AMUF). Although he made vague reference to changes that Congress might make in the AMUF, there was no substantive indication that he sought to impose restrictions on his own or any other president’s authority to wage war precisely as he has for the last four years.

Obama’s blanket interpretation of AMUF – the legal logic – had previously been considered a state secret. It was news to much of the U.S. Senate, too, until assistant secretary of defense Michael Sheehan, in charge of special operations (death squads) at the Pentagon, told lawmakers earlier this month that the AMUF allows Obama to put “boots on the ground” anywhere he chooses, including “Yemen or the Congo,” if his classified logic compelled him to do so.

The senators were stunned – although it is no secret that Obama has already put U.S. Special Forces boots on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan, and has sent a combat brigade on permanent posting on the continent. Central Africa is one part of the world in which al Qaida has found little traction. The purported “bad guy” hiding in the bush, Joseph Kony, is the Christian leader of the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Obama authorized the deployment under the doctrine of Humanitarian Military Intervention, or Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a war-making notion that is, at best, ill-defined under international law and non-existent in U.S. statutes. However, if Obama is sincere (!) in wanting to phase out AMUF, as he averred last week, he’s always got R2P as a backup.

“Why not call for repeal of the layers of war on terror legislation that have accumulated over the last 12 years?”

Death squad honcho Sheehan is a believer in the perpetual lifespan of AMUF, which he considers operative until al Qaida has been consigned to the “ash heap of history” – an eventuality that is “at least 10 to 20 years” away. Since this is the guy who carries out Obama’s kill orders (the identity of his counterpart in the CIA is, of course, a secret), one would think that Sheehan and Obama would be on the same page when it comes to al Qaida and AMUF. But then, we are told that page has turned.

Obama is very good at flipping pages, changing subjects, hiding the pea in his hand while we try to figure out which bowl it’s under. His call for Congress to come up with a substitute for AMUF – without yet offering his own version – is a ploy to more explicitly codify those powers assumed by Bush and expanded upon by the Obama administration. Or, the Congress can do nothing – a very likely outcome – and Obama can pretend to be the reluctant, self-restrained global assassin, preventive detainer and regime changer for the rest of his term.

Western sources claim international forces will stay in Jordan after joint military exercise ‘to prepare for possible intervention in Syria’

A joint military exercise scheduled to take place in Jordan next week is aimed among other things at readying forces for a possible intervention in Syria, Western officials told Ynet on Tuesday.

More than 15,000 soldiers from 18 different countries are set to take part in “Eager Lion 2013.”

The drill will include battlefield, logistics and humanitarian exercises for troops from Britain, Bahrain, Canada, Czech Republic, Israel will not take part in the drill but will continue its “red line” policy against arms shipments to Hezbollah.

According to one western official, forces will remain on the ground after the drill “in case the need will arise to intervene in Syria.”

The maneuvers are set to run for two weeks in the Jordanian army’s training fields, schools and centers.

”Without a doubt this year’s drill will prepare for a possible conflict with Syria,” a Jordanian official told Ynet.

“Jordan must prepare for any abnormal development on this front.”

Jordan fears that Syria’s disintegration could threaten stability in the Hashemite Kingdom.

Both Jerusalem and Amman fear that the hundreds of Syria that would be enforced by the US and other countries such as France and Britain The Daily Beast reported.

In interview with Hezbollah TV station, Syrian president says next shipment of anti-aircraft missiles due to arrive ‘soon’; states his government would not stand in way of groups ‘that will want to fight for liberation of Golan’

In a meeting with European Union ambassadors, Israeli National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror declared the Syrian government’s imminent acquisition of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to be a “red line” that would obligate Israeli military action to prevent them becoming operational.

Israel tracks every heavy missile fired in the Syrian civil war, keen to study Damascus’s combat doctrines and deployments and ready to fend off a feared first attack on its turf, a senior Israeli military officer said on Thursday.

Colonel Zvika Haimovich of the air defense corps said southward launches against Syrian insurgents by President Bashar Assad’s forces gave Israel mere seconds in which to determine it was not the true target – a distinction that could prove crucial for warding off an unprecedented regional conflagration.

“Syria’s batteries are in a high state of operability, ready to fire at short notice. All it would take is a few degrees’ change in the flight path to endanger us”

Turkish security forces found a 2kg cylinder with sarin gas after searching the homes of Syrian militants from the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra Front who were previously detained, Turkish media reports. The gas was reportedly going to be used in a bomb

The sarin gas was found in the homes of suspected Syrian Islamists detained in the southern provinces of Adana and Mersia following a search by Turkish police on Wednesday, reports say. The gas was allegedly going to be used to carry out an attack in the southern Turkish city of Adana.

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey’s military on Thursday returned fire after shots were fired at an armored personnel carrier from across the border with Syria.

A military statement said a group of around three to five people from across the border fired up to 15 shots toward the vehicle that was patrolling an area near the Orontes river, on the frontier. Turkish state-run TRT television said no one was wounded and the military said the group escaped and “disappeared from view” when it fired back.

CARACAS, (SANA) – The media delegation from Venezuela and Latin American countries which visited Damascus recently held a press conference organized by the Syrian Embassy in Caracas on Thursday to discuss the results of their visit to Syria.

The media delegation said that Syria is facing a war waged by an international coalition, and that this has nothing to do with the slogans of freedom of democracy as the western media is distorting the evens in Syria.

The journalists said that their visit’s goal was to tell the world about what is really happening in Syria away from the lies and libel which characterizes many media sources’ coverage of Syria.

They spoke about their field visits and their interviews with Syrian citizens, stressing that Syria is strong and that media talk about its downfall is mere dreams.

The delegation members stressed that what is happening in Syria is not a civil war as some countries and the UN are claiming; rather it’s a real war between Syria and an unprecedented international alliance.

They underlined the negative role played by the UN through its silence over the terrorism affecting Syria.

One of the journalists said that he covered many conflicts around the world, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Egypt, asserting that what happened in these countries is completely different from Syria.

The delegation members focused on the lies and hypocrisy of media outlets regarding the events in Syria, saying that what they witnessed in Syria proves that western media is waging the largest media war in its history.

They affirmed that there are extremist terrorist groups fighting in Syria without cause or a political agenda, noting that they were worried about going to Syria but upon arriving and seeing the truth they were reassured.

The journalists lauded the steadfastness of the Syrian people and their love for life, adding that the Syrians they met told them that they don’t want freedom and democracy from countries that know neither, asserting that Syria has not fallen and will not fall because of its resistant people, wise leadership and strong army.

They also lauded the Russian and Chinese role regarding the events in Syria.